Lecture: Vater, National Alternatives to Zionism (Manchester, Feb 18, 2016)

National Alternatives to Zionism: the case of the Young Hebrews, 1939 – 1976 

Dr Roman Vater (Oxford)
4pm Thu 18 Feb 2016, in A113 Samuel Alexander Building

ABSTRACT: This presentation will explore a particular aspect of a home-grown opposition to Zionism among Hebrew Israelis. With the consolidation of a separate national identity in the pre-state Yishuv (a process whose pinnacle can be dated to the 1930s-1940s), an attitude of denigration and even rejection of Zionism became relatively widespread among the Hebrews. The most radical and articulate ideology that offered a complete national alternative to Zionism in the name of an indigenous Hebrew nationalism was the Young Hebrews’ ideology, popularly known as “Canaanism”. The talk will present the main tenets and principles of Hebrew “Canaanite” nationalism in relation both to Zionism and Arab nationalism. It will explore in particular the historiographic base of “Canaanism”, arguing that divergence in the vision of the past between “Canaanism” and Zionism (as well as Pan-Arabism) is the key element that permits us to perceive the principal incompatibility between Jewish and Hebrew nationalism in the political sphere.

SPEAKER: Roman Vater obtained his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester in 2015. Previously, he studied Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Tel Aviv University (BA, 2004) and the Jagiellonian University (MA, 2010). His research interests include Hebrew nationalism (especially “Canaanism”), right-wing anti-Zionism, Israeli society and dissident politics and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Publications include: “‘Down with Britain, away with Zionism’: the ‘Canaanites’ and Lohamey Herut Israel between two adversaries” (Melilah, 2013) and “Beyond bi-nationalism? The Young Hebrews versus the ‘Palestinian issue'” (Journal of Political Ideologies, forthcoming).

Further information about the CJS research seminar programme and other Jewish Studies events at the University.

New Article: Vater, Beyond Bi-Nationalism? The Young Hebrews versus the ‘Palestinian Issue’

Vater, Roman. “Beyond Bi-Nationalism? The Young Hebrews versus the ‘Palestinian Issue’.” Journal of Political Ideologies 21.1 (2016): 45-60.

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2016.1105406

 

Abstract

The bi-national option for the solution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is as old as Zionism itself. The standard bi-national scenario envisaged an accommodation in a shared polity of separate Jewish and Palestinian identities. The Young Hebrews movement defied this paradigm by arguing that these identities were not national and should be incorporated into the Hebrew nation. This article analyses the Young Hebrews’ solution to the ‘Palestinian issue’ by showing that they used it as a tool to destroy Zionist hegemony in Israel and open the way to a radical geopolitical rearrangement of the entire Middle East.

 

 

 

New Book: Burla and Lawrence, eds. Australia and Israel

Burla, Shahar, and Dashiel Lawrence. Australia and Israel. A Diasporic, Cultural and Political Relationship. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2015.

 

 

Australia and the State of Israel have maintained a cordial if at times ambiguous relationship. The two countries are geographically isolated: strategic, economic and cultural interests lie increasingly with Asia for one, and with the US and the EU for the other. But for all that divides the two states, there is also much they share. Australia played an important role in the Jewish state’s establishment in 1948, and is home to the most Zionist centered Jewish diaspora globally. Jewishness for most Australian Jews has been shaped and defined by engagement with and support for Israel. At the heart of this engagement is a small but thriving Israeli community within the larger multicultural Australia.

Australia and Israel: A Diasporic, Cultural and Political Relationship draws attention to the important historical and contemporary nexus between this diaspora and its imagined homeland. The collection also considers the ways in which these two states mobilise national myths and share environmental challenges. In recent time relations between the two states have been tested by the illegal use of Australian passports in 2010, the mysterious death of dual national Ben Zygier, and growing disquiet within the ranks of the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Greens over Israel’s handling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. One prominent world-wide issue is the Palestinian BDS (Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions) movement, which has attracted sympathy and support that has brought about substantive differences of opinion regarding its legitimacy within the Jewish Australian community. These issues demonstrate the multifaceted and complex picture of two very different nations, that nevertheless share an abiding connection.

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Why the Book?
Shahar Burla and Dashiel Lawrence

Part One Australia and Israel – Diasporic Relationship

1 Rewriting the Rules of Engagement: New Australian Jewish
Connections with Israel
Dashiel Lawrence

2 The Personal, the Political and the Religious: Bnei Akiva
Australia and its Relationship with Israel
Ari Lander

3 Israeli Government and Diaspora Mobilisation: The Flotilla
to Gaza and the Australian Jewry as a Case Study
Shahar Burla

4 The Place of Hebrew and Israel Education in Australian
Jewish Schools
Suzanne Rutland and Zehavit Gross

5 The Ausraeli Approach: the Diasporic Identity of Israelis
in Australia
Ran Porat

Part Two Australia and Israel – Political and Cultural Relationship

6 Overcoming Water Scarcity and Inequity in Arid Lands:
Comparing Water Management in Australia and Israel
Dominic Skinner and Stephanie Galaitsi

7 Ben Zygier’s Story and Australia–Israel Relations
Ingrid Matthews

8 A Fight Worth Having: Rudd, Gillard, Israel and the
Australian Labor Party
Alex Benjamin Burston-Chorowicz

9 An Alliance of Forgetting: National Narratives of Legitimacy
on the Occasion of Israel–Australia’s Joint Stamp Issue
Commemorating the Battle of Beersheba
Micaela Sahhar

Part Three Australia, Israel and the Boycott Divestment and
Sanction Scheme

10 The Australian Greens and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict
Philip Mendes

11 Academic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions: Implications
for Australian–Israeli Relations
Ingrid Matthews and James Arvanitakis

Conclusion: First Cousinhood, Political Unease, and the Limits
of Comparison
Fania Oz-Salzberger

The Editors and Contributors
Index

 

Shahar Burla is a research Associate at the Sydney Jewish Museum. He is the author of Political Imagination in the Diaspora: The Construction of a Pro-Israeli Narrative (2013). He has received several awards, including a President’s Fellowship for outstanding PhD student, Bar-Ilan University and the Menahem Begin Foundation academic award.

Dashiel Lawrence is a doctoral candidate at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. His research interests include Jewish diaspora–Israel contemporary relations, and Jewish critics of Israel.

 

 

New Article: Changes among Israeli Youth Movements: A Structural Analysis

Cohen, Erik H. “Changes among Israeli Youth Movements: A Structural Analysis Based on Kahane’s Code of Informality.” Cambridge Journal of Education 45.2 (2015): 223-43.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2014.934205

 

Abstract

Multi-dimensional data analysis tools are applied to Reuven Kahane’s data on the informality of youth organizations, yielding a graphic portrayal of Kahane’s code of informality. This structure helps address questions of the whether the eight structural components exhaustively cover the field without redundancy. Further, the structure is used to examine changes in Israeli youth movements over two time periods (1925–1960 and 1960–1990). It is found that social aspects of the group have become more important, while ideology (especially socialist ideology) is less emphasized. Directions for continued research among youth movements since 1990 are explored.

New Article: Gledhill, The British Hashomer Hatzair Movement

Gledhill, Jim. “Forces of Tomorrow. Youth Culture and Identity in the British Hashomer Hatzair Movement.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 14.2 (2015): 280-98.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2015.1009730

 

Abstract

This article examines the social experience of belonging to the British section of the international Socialist Zionist youth movement, Hashomer Hatzair. The study is based on interviews conducted with 10 former activists across four generations and focuses primarily on the movement in London. It will be argued that Hashomer Hatzair represented a unique alternative youth culture based on a model developed by the movement’s founders in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This model synthesized Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting, the Jugendkultur of the German youth movements, Socialist Zionism and Marxism. Imported to Britain by young German and Austrian refugees from Nazism, this youth culture was reproduced initially in the English countryside, and after the war plugged into the pre-existing politics of Jewish radicalism in London and the general Zionist fervour that anticipated the establishment of Israel. Hashomer Hatzair emphasized autonomy from adult society. By creating autonomous youth spaces, the movement opened a portal for young Jews to shape their own identities. Through a process of politicization and education, the movement’s adherents would identify life on Israeli kibbutzim as an ideal future in adulthood. In tandem with the projection of heroic Jewish role models, this process encouraged Hashomer Hatzair’s followers to define their Jewishness in secular and existential terms, in opposition both to contemporary consumerist and urbanized capitalism, and to the traditional communal associations of the past.

 

New Article: Heller, Jabotinsky’s Youth Politics and the Case for Authoritarian Leadership

Heller, Daniel Kupfert. “Obedient Children and Reckless Rebels: Jabotinsky’s Youth Politics and the Case for Authoritarian Leadership, 1931–1933.” Journal of Israeli History (early view, online first).

 

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13531042.2015.1005819

 

Abstract

This article traces the pivotal role that ideas about “youth” and “generationhood” played in Vladimir Jabotinsky’s political strategy as leader of the Union of Revisionist Zionists and its youth movement, Brit Yosef Trumpeldor (Betar). During the leadership struggle within the movement between 1931 and 1933, Jabotinsky believed that he could draw upon debates sweeping across Europe about the nature of youth, their role in politics, and the challenges of “generational conflict” in order to convince his followers that his increasingly authoritarian behavior was the only mode of leadership available to Zionist leaders in the 1930s. The article demonstrates that Jabotinsky’s deliberately ambiguous and provocative constructions of “youth” and “generationhood” within the movement’s party literature and in articles addressed to the Polish Jewish public, as well as the innovative ways in which he delimited “youth” from “adult” in his movement’s regulations, allowed him to further embrace authoritarian measures within the movement without publicly abandoning his claim to be a firm proponent of democracy.

 

CFP: Jewish Youth Movements and Jewish Youth in Europe or Palestine between the World Wars

Professor Aviva Halamish and I are seeking participants for an AJS session on current research on Jewish youth movements and Jewish youth in Europe or Palestine between the world wars. The session commemorates 100 years to Hashomer Hatzair (1913-2013) so if there are enough papers on Hashomer Hatzair, we will concentrate on the movement.

 

Ofer Nur

Tel Aviv U.

 

E-mail: eifo.ofer [at] gmail [dot] com